Pretentious Pictures Presents:

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE

A comedy with a dark center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up "older" and finds her life with a younger man undignified. The stage version was produced in at the Creative Place Theatre in NYC.

Proposed: Frances McDormand

Diana, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.

She deals with a birthday by throwing him out. They're right for each other, she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back, because her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

Proposed: Woody Harrelson

So she makes do with the respectable but empty life she'd thought she needed, with her lawyer Griff—more her age, and on her success level. Griff has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance.

Proposed: Gael García Bernal

Jim is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late. Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.

Proposed: Jennifer Coolidge

Betsy, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed: Adelaide Clemens

Jackie, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy. She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.

Proposed: Owen Teague

Betsy's son Dylan—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably. He disgusts her.

Proposed: Rosie Perez 

Maria, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed: Amy Brenneman

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

Pretentious pictures presents

a comedy with a dark center.

Toby Gets Un-Stupid: A Toby Moment

"I do not conquer. I submit."—Giacomo Casanova

On Amazon

“You’re really stupid,” said the child.

“No I’m not. You are.”

“She’s right,” said Toad.

We were under the awning of a beach restaurant, Toad and I, watching women, mostly topless, while our own women frolicked in the sea. Me, anyway. Toad was at his phone studying stocks. The rich do that. They study stocks. I study bare breasts.

“Right about what?”

“She’s not stupid. You are.”

“Fuck off, Toad.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“I’m telling mommy you said that.”

I waved the child away as one would whisk at a fly.

“I can do anything I want,” it said.

“So can I.”

“No you can’t.”

“Yes, he can,” said Toad, scarcely glancing up.

I made a face at the child.

“Just because mommy pays for you!”

“So? Too bad.”

“I can make you un-stupid,” said the child.

“No thanks. I’m good.”

Some women in string bottoms paused in front of us, surveying the restaurant.

“Are you staring at me?” said one of them.

“How can you tell that through my sunglasses?”

“I can.”

“Very clever. Whenever I meet a woman who’s smarter than I am, I fall in love.”

“He falls in love with a lot of women,” said the child.

If it suddenly turned blue and started to choke, I would watch with interest.

“I’m smarter than you are.”

“I said woman. A little pimple like you doesn’t count.”

The ladies smirked and strolled on, jiggling impossibly smooth cheeks. I checked Toad to see if he shared this moment, but he was poking his phone.

“Greed, Toad. Simple greed.”

In the sea Marcie stood knee-deep, the adipose on her inner thighs an incitement to the teeth. When I meet a woman who’s less intelligent than I am I allow myself to be fallen in love with. Which is all right too. Big warm vacant blue eyes, and irresistibly rich—in charm, in money, and she has me!

Beside her was Toad’s teenage bride, an exquisite little thing, if she could be restrained from plucking at her underwear. When you look like Toad you have to be real rich to get a woman like Darleen.

She looked back at me with longing, poor cupcake. I am her dream; Toad, her semi-reptilian reality.

I glanced at him, slaving away.

A fat woman paused before us, one of those flippers-and-flab monsters that once in a while wash up, limp, shining, unidentifiable, but with a human head and mammalian extrusions, for she too was topless. One had to suppose she was wearing a string bottom, but her buttocks and overhang obscured it, and even the patch on her mouse was lost in there.

She squinted into the darkened restaurant and shouted to the waiter, “Aren’t there any more chairs out here?”

“You can sit on Toby,” said the child.

“Who’s Toby?”

It indicated myself, and before I could think of a decent demur the sea creature sized me up and dropped her naked mass onto my lap.

“He’s nice!”

“Why don’t you take him?”

“Can I?”

“Sure. You just have to feed him.”

As the blood drained from my thighs she gave me a second appraisal. “OK.”

I squirmed under her weight, but she took this for foreplay and ground her stuff on me. “You’re good-looking.”

“Thank you. Don’t you have any restraint?”

“Where you from?”

Typical American question. Don’t answer. Could be a process server.

She presented her front as if to nurse me when—

“Tobee!” said Marcie, “what are you doing?”

“She’s taking him away,” said the child.

Marcie marched over and absorbed this. “Oh, yeah?”

“Get off him, Lard-Ball,” said Darleen. “He’s ours.”

“Darleen!” said Toad.

“Whatsa matter with you, Toad? Ain’t you got no es-prie de corpse?” And to the large lady, “Get your jelly bag up and moving!”

But I had now become territory to be defended, and there was no sign of retreat.

Marcie, hands on hips, glared at me. “Toby! Why is she sitting on you?”

I stretched around my ravisher and pointed at the child. “Andrea did it.”

“Andrea!” said Marcie, fixing the child with maternal wrath.

“So? He’s just a big ding-dong!”

Darleen put her nose to the squatter’s. “You better git to gittin’. What do I have to do, call a fork-lift?”

My burden tilted and rolled to her feet, at which I withdrew my knees and crossed my legs in the other direction.

A moment of danger as the women faced each other. Then my assailant waddled away, rolling the topography of her dorsal surface. “There’s no chairs here anyway.”

Marcie sat on my lap and hugged me. “Boy, Toby!”

“I’m all right,” I said. “She almost got me.”

Indeed, I could not but reflect upon the fragility of my situation.

“See?” said the child. “Now you’re not so stupid.”

On YouTube

More Toby Moments

In Print

Coming soon,

The Toby Series

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

I-could-not-love-thee-dear-so-much-loved-I-not-moi-même-more sort of thing.

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film review: Hillbilly Elegy

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Toby books:

Toby Moments on YouTube

Here on the blog:

Toby's Marriage Tips for Men

Also on YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE

A comedy with a dark center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up "older" and finds her life with a younger man undignified. The stage version was produced in at the Creative Place Theatre in NYC.

Attached: Bo Derek

Diana, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.

She deals with a birthday by throwing him out. They're right for each other, she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back, because her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

Proposed, to direct and to star: John Turturro

So she makes do with the respectable but empty life she'd thought she needed, with her lawyer Griff—more her age, and on her success level. Griff has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance.

Proposed: Gael García Bernal

Jim is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late. Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.

Proposed: Jennifer Coolidge

Betsy, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed: Adelaide Clemens

Jackie, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy. She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.

Proposed: Owen Teague

Betsy's son Dylan—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably. He disgusts her.

Proposed: Rosie Perez 

Maria, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed: Amy Brenneman

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

Pretentious pictures presents

a comedy with a dark center.